Category Archives: Saskatchewan

I GREW UP in Los Angeles, the city by the freeway by the sea. And if there’s one thing I’ve known ever since I could sit up in my car seat, it’s that you should expect to run into traffic at any point of the day. Yes, commute hours are the worst, but I’ve run into dead-stop bumper-to-bumper cars on the 405 at 2 a.m.

As a kid, I used to ask my parents why they couldn’t just build more lanes on the freeway. Maybe transform them all into double-decker highways with cars zooming on the upper and lower levels.

Except, as it turns out, that wouldn’t work. Because if there’s anything that traffic engineers have discovered in the last few decades it’s that you can’t build your way out of congestion. It’s the roads themselves that cause traffic.

The concept is called induced demand, which is economist-speak for when increasing the supply of something (like roads) makes people want that thing even more. Though some traffic engineers made note of this phenomenon at least as early as the 1960s, it is only in recent years that social scientists have collected enough data to show how this happens pretty much every time we build new roads. These findings imply that the ways we traditionally go about trying to mitigate jams are essentially fruitless, and that we’d all be spending a lot less time in traffic if we could just be a little more rational.

But before we get to the solutions, we have to take a closer look at the problem. In 2009, two economists—Matthew Turner of the University of Toronto and Gilles Duranton of the University of Pennsylvania—decided to compare the amount of new roads and highways built in different U.S. cities between 1980 and 2000, and the total number of miles driven in those cities over the same period.

“We found that there’s this perfect one-to-one relationship,” said Turner.

If a city had increased its road capacity by 10 percent between 1980 and 1990, then the amount of driving in that city went up by 10 percent. If the amount of roads in the same city then went up by 11 percent between 1990 and 2000, the total number of miles driven also went up by 11 percent. It’s like the two figures were moving in perfect lockstep, changing at the same exact rate.

Now, correlation doesn’t mean causation. Maybe traffic engineers in U.S. cities happen to know exactly the right amount of roads to build to satisfy driving demand. But Turner and Duranton think that’s unlikely. The modern interstate network mostly follows the plan originally conceived by the federal government in 1947, and it seems incredibly coincidental that road engineers at the time could have successfully predicted driving demand more than half a century in the future.

A more likely explanation, Turner and Duranton argue, is what they call the fundamental law of road congestion: New roads will create new drivers, resulting in the intensity of traffic staying the same.

Intuitively, I would expect the opposite: that expanding a road network works like replacing a small pipe with a bigger one, allowing the water (or cars) to flow better. Instead, it’s like the larger pipe is drawing more water into itself. The first thing you wonder here is where all these extra drivers are coming from. I mean, are they just popping out of the asphalt as engineers lay down new roads?

The answer has to do with what roads allow people to do: move around. As it turns out, we humans love moving around. And if you expand people’s ability to travel, they will do it more, living farther away from where they work and therefore being forced to drive into town. Making driving easier also means that people take more trips in the car than they otherwise would. Finally, businesses that rely on roads will swoop into cities with many of them, bringing trucking and shipments. The problem is that all these things together erode any extra capacity you’ve built into your street network, meaning traffic levels stay pretty much constant. As long as driving on the roads remains easy and cheap, people have an almost unlimited desire to use them.

You might think that increasing investment in public transit could ease this mess. Many railway and bus projects are sold on this basis, with politicians promising that traffic will decrease once ridership grows. But the data showed that even in cities that expanded public transit, road congestion stayed exactly the same. Add a new subway line and some drivers will switch to transit. But new drivers replace them. It’s the same effect as adding a new lane to the highway: congestion remains constant. (That’s not to say that public transit doesn’t do good, it also allows more people to move around. These projects just shouldn’t be hyped up as traffic decongestants, say Turner and Duranton.)

Interestingly, the effect works in reverse, too. Whenever some city proposes taking lanes away from a road, residents scream that they’re going to create a huge traffic snarl. But the data shows that nothing truly terrible happens. The amount of traffic on the road simply readjusts and overall congestion doesn’t really increase.

Of course the last paragraph is exactly how downtown Saskatoon will survive University Bridge being shut down and Better Bike Lanes. It is also why road diets will work.

Please note the PSA below for the next round of future growth public consultations. I am getting the impression that members of the administration have already determined that there will be a new river crossing at 33rd Street. They believe that this was supported by the majority of the citizens at the last round of consultations. However, the attendance numbers were very low at those meetings and no one has provided me with accurate data on the demographics to get a clear understanding of who attended.

I know that many residents of numerous neighbourhoods in Ward 1 are opposed to a river crossing at this location. They are concerned about new traffic patterns developing as well as increased volumes and speeds of traffic throughout the entire 33rd Street corridor as well as in the residential neighbourhoods.

Please spread the word and ensure that an effort is made to attend the meetings listed below.

I personally cannot understand the need for more river crossings in Saskatoon than Calgary, Edmonton, or even Manhattan have. With a proper focus on a real transit system to serve the citizens, further development of walkable neighbourhoods, and properly planned infill – another river crossing would not be required.

Here is the PSA

HAVE YOUR SAY IN SASKATOON’S FUTURE! GROWTH PLAN PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT OPEN NOW UNTIL WEDNESDAY, MARCH 18, 2015, AT WWW.GROWINGFWD.CA

The City of Saskatoon invites residents to participate in the third round of open public engagement for the Growth Plan to Half a Million (Growth Plan).

Input is being sought on the recommended long-term plans for a new transit system with Bus Rapid Transit (BRT); a new river crossing at 33rd Street; BRT lanes on the University Bridge; and, redevelopment along major corridors like 8th Street, 22nd Street, and Preston Avenue.

The public also has an opportunity to provide feedback on the recommended implementation priorities for putting specific features of the Growth Plan in motion over the short- , medium- , and long-term.

Detailed project information and an online survey will be available at www.growingfwd.ca beginning Wednesday, February 25, through Wednesday, March 18, 2015.

In addition to online engagement, there are several public events being hosted for residents to learn more and provide input into the development of the Growth Plan.

The input gathered during this round of engagement will help to develop the long-term plans for corridor redevelopment, transit, and core area bridges, as well as set the direction for an implementation plan. We will be back in the fall to share what we heard and confirm the final Growth Plan with the public.

Once complete, the Growth Plan will help to guide future infrastructure investments so residents will have more choices for how they live and move around the city as Saskatoon grows to half a million people over the next 30 to 40 years.

For more information on the Growth Plan or to sign up for project update notifications, please visit www.growingfwd.ca.

Not sure if Councillor Hill agrees but I think a 33rd Street Bridge would kill the 33rd Street Business Improvement District and really hurt Mayfair and Caswell Hill. I really agree with Darren Hill’s view on this. Public Transportation needs to be the goal.

I haven’t done one of these in a long while but here are the highlights from today’s City Council meeting.

Both Pat Lorje and Zach Jeffries brought up the missing reports on the city council website. Administration just kind of made up a reply and suggested they don’t have enough space to host all of them. They are preparing a report on it and will present that to Council in April. So yeah, administration was passive aggressive on the issue.

Now to be fair to administration, they scan stuff in the most inefficient way possible. It is basically JPGs of paper reports converted to PDFs. It means that the reports are often not searchable or indexed and are MASSIVE in size. I am assuming that administration doesn’t have the space to host normal PDFs but it could be that they are handling these HULK sized PDFs. (“PDF Angry! PDF SMASH!”). Either way, disk space as an excuse is a weak one.

Eric Olauson brought up the issue of efficiencies for new businesses in getting set up in the city. It’s a great point and Calgary has made some great progress.on streamlining processes in many areas of the city. Administration seemed to shrug it off. Hopefully Olauson keeps pushing for it. I’ll just post this link to a Vox story that Olauson posted to Twitter last week. I was hoping he would bring it up today. It’s worth reading and would have made for an interesting debate considering Council voted to give Urban Systems a large contract to do what Houston did for free. Of course the mandate for Urban Systems is larger than just transit. In its mandate is all of active transportation (cycling, pedestrians, long boarding). Some asked if there was much debate. There wasn’t but with most of those kinds of things, the debate takes place once it comes back to Council.

Darren Hill asked the administration to take into account the impact city projects have on active transportation (walking, cycling, and long boarding). I believe that if records were kept, Hill is Canada’s strongest long boarding advocate.

Olauson also brought up the issue that as a councillor gets complaints about an issue and it is kind of swept under the rug by admin who says, there is no issue. As Olauson brought up, there is an issue because councillors keep hearing about it.

Clark brought this up twice but he called out the administration for using the term customer service in talking about citizens. He essentially said that we are all in this together and City Hall needs to remember that. It was a good thought. Not that customer service is wrong but I am not a customer of City Hall but a resident of Saskatoon. Clark later referenced that when he said that snow removal is an act of citizenship.

Ann Iwanchuk and Zach Jeffries both rose to talk about snow removal. Both brought up the idea that we don’t want to punish people who are making a good effort or are on vacation. I know what they are saying but isn’t that a responsibility of home ownership? Shouldn’t you make arrangements or hire someone to shovel when you leave?

I believe Pat Lorje was calling out City Centre Church for not shovelling their sidewalks.

Twitter feedback suggests that some neighbourhoods are way better at snow removal then others. There seems to be some consensus that City Park is horrible at it.

There you go. Short and almost sweet. Councillors then retired upstairs where they had an executive meeting that was in-camera (closed door).

Hey there is a new ad by the Saskatchewan New Democrats out. I’ll leave my comments at this. As an attack ad, it tries to do too much. It should have been two ads. The discussion as to where the money went, can be left for another day.

Disclaimer: I generally hate all political ads. I liked the Daisy ad but that’s it. I like long policy discussions with nuance. I don’t think that has ever happened in a political ad so I am always disappointed in them.

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This is a weblog about urban issues, technology, & culture published by Jordon Cooper since 2001. You can read about me and the site here and if you are looking for one of my columns in The StarPhoenix, you can find them here.